In the Key of C
by ShreddingRibbons
Summary: This Ahiru is not his character. She is a character he remembers, and has tried so desperately to copy. She is a rag doll of memories and experiences, her pieces stitched crudely together, the workmanship failing to hide the desperation showing through.


Disclaimer: The characters and musical pieces in this work belong to their respectful sources, not me.

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><p>Somewhere, a piano played.<p>

Wherever she was she was dancing, dancing while her bones creaked with an age she never felt and her skin stretched with a youth she couldn't quite remember. The gritty screams of grinding cogs echoed like a nightmare drawn with chalk that's faded with rain. But still she danced, her pointe shoes stained with ink, her white hands traced with words (lifelifelifelife), the bend of her wrists like the curve of the horizon, night swallowing the sun, greedy and cold. There was something she had to remember, a person, or the concept of a person. It was more like a sensation, she thought, her feet bleeding, bleeding as she danced; a sensation of a dry palm pressing against her own, a lingering arm after a lift into the air, and somewhere, a piano played…

In a room awash with moonlight, a girl falls out of a dream.

"Fakir." The whisper curls like smoke into the silence of the room, but she knows he hears her voice. "Are you dreaming?"

"No." silence wrinkles the air. "…were you?"

"I was dancing. There was Chopin playing, the polonaise in C minor, and I was dancing."

Strands of her orange hair reach like cold hands across his chest and his arm comes to touch her pale skin, a study of moonlight.

"It's hard to keep all the pieces together, when you're writing a character that isn't yours." The boy with the black hair has difficulty breathing around the guilt in his throat.

Ahiru is a miracle unto herself. She is stretched across two different universes of story, she is told one is her past, the other her future. Fakir wrote that she maintained all her memories, but without specification, her recollections are muddy, confused. Most of the time, she is fine, happy, laughing with Pique and Lillie, feeding the ducks, wondering aloud how Rue and Sigfreid are doing, in a land so far away time itself cannot properly describe it.

But sometimes, the paint of sanity peels, and she does not remember. Her thoughts and actions become base; she can talk, and eat, and walk, and dance, and looks to Fakir and Fakir alone (safeyou'resafesosafe). These episodes have become uncommon, but she still leaves sometimes when she's asleep, to a place between the endings and the beginnings, a place between the stories, where the fabric of existence has begun to fray. Sometimes she's afraid it'll tear. The Ahiru Fakir remembers is not her; his Ahiru was made by someone else, and was taken away by someone else. This Ahiru, her sinews and marrow strung through Fakir's ink, is a little sadder, a little thinner. This Ahiru is older, and she does not smile as much.

It is at these times, when he is sleeping and she is not, that she knows one day he will burn her in a bed of orange flame.

It is a fact that Fakir is not as skilled as Drosselmeyer. He is still a fledgling, still unsure how to create something truly sentient with the scratch of his quill. The fabric of life is very delicate, and he patches it together instead of sewing something of his own. This Ahiru is not his character. She is a character he remembers, and has tried so desperately to copy. She is a rag doll of memories and experiences, her pieces stitched crudely together, the workmanship failing to hide the desperation showing through.

The duckgirl turns to see if her author is asleep.

Skinny and pale, she slides out from under the sheets, the warmth of her other's body leaving like a sigh from her skin. Solemn-faced, she walks to the study with the ocean in her eyes, restless and detached. There, in a box of cherrywood, she finds her story, written on rough stationary. Her small white hand slides over the words, as if to feel the life inside them.

_There once was a boy, a boy who fell in love with a duck…_

On tip toe Ahiru reaches for a new ink pot and a black-feathered quill on the top of a shelf, her small feet curving against the mahogany floors. With a piece of paper in hand, she begins to write. Her writing, unlike Fakir's, is too round and too big, choked with flourishes and curlicues and ink-spots that bleed and smear. They are small and neat and spidery, the words that brought her to life.

Fakir would later find this paper on his desk, and weep as he read the words that grew like flowers on the page.

_Next time you write me, write a better me. Write a me that doesn't dream of dancing inside crystal eggs, a me that doesn't cry, a me that remembers. In short, write a me that's yours. I was created for you, so you were perfect in my eyes, another person could never be so perfect, but I was not perfect to you. Write a me that isn't me. Don't write a me based off of someone you remember, a duck that was a girl, a miracle, a princess. Write me imperfect, odd, awkward. Don't write about a memory._

_Write about a girl._

Finishing her composition, her hands sticky with black stains, she leaves the paper to dry, taking care to weight it down so it won't curl like she's seen Fakir do a hundred times before.

Gingerly avoiding the planks on the floor that creak, the pale girl with the ocean in her eyes carries the story that kept her alive to the hearth, where the fire breathes its hot sighs throughout the house. There she kneels, on the rug by the fire, and smoothes out the dry pages on the floor. She sits there for a while, holding the pages, thinking about, of all things, the moon. It's so distant, its white face staring out across the forests and fields and universes, unimpressionable and serene (beautifulgodit'ssobeautiful).

And then, without a sound, she sets them on the flames.

As the reality of the girl disintegrates and decays, she has a funny thought which is, fittingly enough, her last. As the ocean in her eyes turns ochre with blaze she thinks about something Fakir did when he finished a story. After etching out a sloppy "the end" he would stretch his crippled hand, working out the taut muscles that would still ache cruelly upon occasion. This thought doesn't mean anything really, but she smiles as the skin of her being curls like burning paper, devoured by the mouth of fire, a smile that can only be seen once, can only be smiled once. This is the smile that death paints upon pale faces.

And somewhere, a piano played.


End file.
